Mary's breasts: Why did they vanish?

At its heartwarming core, Christmas is the story of a birth: the tender relationship between a new mother and her newborn child.

Indeed, that maternal bond between the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus has resonated so deeply across the centuries that depicting the blessed intimacy of the first Noel has become an integral part of the Christmas industry.

Yet all the familiar scenes associated with the holy family today are also missing an obvious element of the mother-child connection that modern Christians are apparently happy to do without: that of a breast-feeding infant.

So what happened to Mary's breasts? It's a centuries-old story, but one that has a relatively brief answer: namely, the rise of the printing press in 15th-century Europe.

The advent of movable type led to mass-market pornography and wider circulation of anatomical drawings for medical purposes, which in turn contributed to the demystification of the body. Both undermined traditional views of the body as a reflection of the divine.

The mass marketing of the Bible and the rise of Protestantism encouraged a focus on Scriptures and discouraged the use of images and “Catholic” practices like devotion to the Virgin Mary and the saints.

The cultural shift was so great that even Catholics soon came to regard the breast as an “inappropriate” image for churches.

“Ask anybody in the street what's the primary Christian symbol and they would say the Crucifixion,” said Margaret Miles, author of “A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350-1750,” a book that traces the disappearance of the image of the breast-feeding Mary after the Renaissance.

“It was the takeover of the Crucifixion as the major symbol of God's love for humanity” that supplanted the breast-feeding icon, she said. That was a decisive shift from the earliest days of Christianity when “the virgin's nursing breast, the lactating virgin, was the primary symbol of God's love for humanity.”

By the Middle Ages, the breast-feeding Mary was shown in every possible context, and “lactation miracles” and “milk shrines” proliferated across the Christian world.

Yet once the breast became an object of medical and sexual interest, it quickly vanished as an object of sacred desire.

Miles said she found no religious paintings of a breast-feeding Mary after 1750. .

So after all this secularization and sexualization, can the breast make a comeback as a religious symbol?

The potential is there. Some conservatives are pushing the nursing Jesus as a symbol for the anti-abortion movement. Believers of a more liberal bent have cited the breast-feeding Virgin Mary as an inspiration for social justice policies. And many Latino Catholics have preserved a devotion to La Virgen de la Leche, a following that could grow along with the U.S. Latino population.